Platonov’s Utopia as Freethinking

The article discusses the methods (formal-logical and dialectical), by the supperposition of which Andrei Platonov creates a unique style of narration in his only fully completed novel Chevengur. The purpose of the writer is to discover a way to build a utopian society, which after the Russian proletarian revolution of 1917 began to define planetary life as a theory and possible social action. A special role in the clarification of these methods belongs to the concept of the observer, or, as Platonov sometimes calls him, the overseer. In the 1920s, this idea developed intensively. On the one hand, the concept of observer shows the functioning of a certain knowledge of the world, and, on the other hand, through it, as if in a mirror, the problems posed by a person in the course of the quest for new solutions are reflected. The observer is the center of the universe, where all information is collected, and it is the observer who evaluates the internal and external freedom of events construction. The original goal of the Chevengur novel is to show the method of building a communist utopia, that is, a society that really has no place in the world. According to Platonov, only in this situation of absence, freethinking is possible. This paradox was formed due to the conviction that not only communism is the end of history, but that consciousness is precisely and only historical, and the process of history is exactly as it was presented by the creators of the communist idea Marx and Lenin. The communist idea of history implies transitions from one economic formation to another, the renewal of “united Earth.” As “the era of technical revolutions has come,” the freedom of thought is denied, and “careful thought about technology improvement” is only recognized. Therefore, utopia is a way of freethinking.

communism, freedom, technology, revolution, music, secondary person, duality, ordeals of the mind, utopia, life, death.

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